


Empty Hands

by insideimfeelindirty



Series: Where's My Love [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 20:49:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8342224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insideimfeelindirty/pseuds/insideimfeelindirty
Summary: Clarke's POV, before, during and after.





	

She has selfish moments that she keeps to herself. She has moments where darkness overwhelms her and she’s ready to abandon all her principles. She keep them hidden from everyone, but sometimes, alone and desperate she swears she’d give them all up for him.

She looks up at the concrete ceiling, imagines the star filled heavens but knowing she’s speaking to nothing when she begs and pleads in urgent whispers for the one thing she wants but can’t have.

_Take anything away from me, take them all, just please, please - let me have this one thing._

Waiting for the inevitable is torture, each passing day where his voice gets a little more hoarse, his bravado a little less persuasive is like having an anvil slowly squeezing life out of her beating heart.

In desperate moments she claws at the steel door, nails raw and bloody, throat screamed silent. Raven pulls her away with firm hands and they don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about how the door is mechanically sealed and how Raven ignores her wild pleas to let her out or to let him in. They don’t talk about how she has to talk him through his own slow suicide.

She avoids Octavia, ducks away from her wild, pained eyes. They are both desperate for the same thing, both destructive enough to risk everything. But they also both learned about sacrifice, about selflessness from Bellamy. So they look at each other from across cramped bunker rooms, mouths twisted in pain and eyes purple with grief, and they keep their distance.

* * *

 

  
She clutches the radio tightly in her hand, knuckles white and fingertips bloody red. There is nothing but static coming from the radio now, loud and angry but she can’t bring herself to turn it off. She can’t bring herself to cut the line that has tethered her to him during these final moments.

Her eyes are raw, barely seeing through tears that seem to have built a wall in front of her eyes. The echo of a lullaby her mother taught her hangs on her lips still, all the love and comfort in the words having been spent. She is silent, frozen in time as her world falls to pieces around her like ashes from a raging fire. Her chest burns and her lungs are filled with smoke, the future they had always fought for incinerating in her hands.

She staggers over to the control room, the mass of black and white screens trained in on the destruction outside flickering in time with the electricity. Her eyes run over them, desperately, hungrily. She spots a black shape slumped against the perimeter wall, awkwardly twisted, and her breath is suddenly knocked out of her.

She hears a strangled wail, a raw, hoarse, animalistic sound, unlike any she’s ever heard before. It’s not until Raven springs to her feet, hands up in pacifying motions that she realises it’s coming from her.

“Don’t,” Raven pleads, hands grabbing and soothing her own flailing, reaching limbs. “Don’t look."

She feels the scream that comes out of her, feels it rip through her throat and shred her ear drums, feels it tear up the roots of her heart. She grasps at the screen, at the still shape that is already unrecognisable as human form, batting away well-meaning hands. Her tears blind her as she runs trembling fingers over the glass screen, over the man who loved everyone else so much more than himself that it ended him.

“He’s _gone_."

Ravens words fall like stones to the earth, too fast and too hard, their destruction inevitable. She screams, she cries, she wails. Her throat splits in two around her howls, but still she screams louder, as loud as she can. She halfway hopes that if he could hear her screaming on his way away from her, he would turn around and come back. But her screams only solidify his departure, only drives him further from her.

When her mother’s voice joins Raven’s in trying to soothe her she knows she’s about to get the same sedative they gave Octavia before he was even gone. She welcomes the darkness, the heavy numbness and the silence, her own screams echoing in her ears and emptiness swallowing her heart.

* * *

 

  
She barely sleeps, and doesn’t dream for weeks. She grows desperate against the all-consuming exhaustion, covering her eyes, tossing and turning on her makeshift bed just to escape her own mind for a few blissful hours. When she is finally overcome, the blank darkness is the best part of her day, the absence of thoughts and feelings her only release.

Mostly she lies there feeling like she is losing her mind. She keeps seeing his face, hearing his voice, feeling his fingers brush against her. They don’t even feel like memories, they are so vivid and real, the sight, sound and smell of him still fresh in her mind. Hallucinations of him haunt her, conjuring up moments that never happened between them, moments she’d imagined over and over in her mind but never had the time to live.

In her mind’s eye he makes it to the bunker on time, or she refuses to leave without him and they stay behind together. Sometimes he never decides to sacrifice himself at all. Sometimes he tells her he loves her.

Her mind plays her an endless loop of perfect happy moments, alternate endings and what ifs that soothe her shredded heart, but they don’t last. They shimmer at the edges like mirages before they disappear, leaving her more broken than before. Her mind is showing her everything she could’ve had and then tears it away from her.

Every night she tries to rewind to where they started, to see if she could have changed anything. Sometimes she rewinds to Arkadia as they were leaving, sometimes she rewinds back further, to the mountain, the dropship, the Ark. She desperately searches her mind for a way she could’ve saved him, or at least persuaded him to save himself.

Every night she comes up with the same devastating answer. He could never love himself enough to let her save him. He’d rather suffer alone than watch anyone else do it in his place. And as much as she wishes she could hate him for it, she knows it’s one of the reasons she loves him like she does.

Every night he haunts her, her mind playing twisted games with her heart. Every night he leaves her all over again, dancing on the graveyard of their memories. Every night he burns her bones with his fire but leaves her heart cold and her hands empty.

* * *

 

It’s weeks before she realises. Weeks pass and her brain finally catches up with her body. It’s easy to ignore the signs when her eyes are raw and itchy, when her heart is a bloody mess and her head thumps with painful thoughts. It’s easy to put it down to grief when her entire body screams with exhaustion and her stomach revolts against anything she puts in it.

It becomes the new norm - aching everything and a constant background queasiness. She pays little attention to her body while her mind wars and her heart mourns. Finally, her body has to scream to get her attention.

She accidentally brushes her arm against her breasts and the shooting pain is her wake up call. Her body is swollen beyond reasoning, parts of her aching that grieving alone can’t account for. The constant nausea suddenly takes on a different meaning, a terrifying, impossible, cruel meaning.

Her mother confirms it the next day and hugs her carefully like this might be the thing that finally breaks her for good. She thinks it might be too.

Suddenly there is a future again, one she had never imagined, never hoped for. It feels like a betrayal to him, to give him something to live for after he’s already gone and she spends days crying bitter tears that won’t change a thing.

She tells Octavia a week later after she catches her crying on the bathroom floor, arms clutching the toilet bowl. Her mouth goes slack with shock and her eyes well up and she thinks maybe it feels like another loss to her too. But then she flings her tiny, strong arms around her in a savage embrace, and she doesn’t let go.

They sit on the cold floor for longer than is comfortable for either of them, rocking slowly in each others arms, cheeks wet and eyes sore, but it feels like a step forward. When Octavia pulls back to look at her, to search her face for the truth, there is no hiding it from her.

“You want this,” she says, and there is a faint sparkle in the blue that has been missing for months.

She wants this, because he would have wanted it. He would’ve wanted it for her.

“He should be here,” she whispers, and they let her words hang between them, because there is nothing that can be said to lessen the pain of his absence.

“This life is a gift,” Octavia insists, her hands clutching hers tightly. Of course there is always space for more life to her, whatever the circumstances. No matter the sacrifice, life is precious.

They stay huddled together, pain vibrating between them, loss tethering them to each other. But now there is also hope, there is also future, there is a legacy they have to preserve.

It doesn’t lessen her grief, or suddenly fill her hands again, but it softens the sharp edges, gives her something to reach for. Her hallucinations turn to dreams, dreams of him carrying a smaller version of himself on his shoulders, of a soft smile over a sleeping form and it feels less like a mirage and more like a truth that she can hold on to.

Somehow, it feels like his words to her at the end were true.

_I'm here._

He made it.

 


End file.
